On: ISO C became unusable for operating systems develo...

[WalterBright]

I had another such discussion where I suggested that C abandon support for EBCDIC. I was told it was great that C supported any character set! I said C certainly does not, and gave RADIX50 as an example.

How many C programs today would work with EBCDIC? Zero? There's no modern point in C not requiring ASCII, at a minimum.

[gpderetta → WalterBright]

FWIW, C++ dropped support for EBCDIC when it dropped trigraphs. IBM complained till the last minute.

[slavik81 → WalterBright]

What is it about RADIX50 that makes it incompatible with the C standard? The lack of a reserved null value?

[WalterBright → slavik81]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_RADIX_50

Note the lack of lower case, characters like { } ( ) [ ] * : & | # !, and on and on.

[slavik81 → WalterBright]

Oh, as a source file encoding. Well, it lacks the characters needed for trigraphs, so maybe we could add support with a quadgraphs extension...

[sedatk → WalterBright]

> I was told it was great that C supported any character set

I'm all for extensibility mechanisms to shut down the people like this. You want EBCDIC? It's now a github repository; go ahead and maintain it, or shut up.